Rating: 4 stars (out of 4)Janelle Monae’s hair could’ve been designed by an architect. With her angular features and Grace Jones-with-a-riding-crop couture, she oozes exotic mystique. Her music, she says in the liner notes to her new album, draws inspiration from Fela’s cigarettes, Peter Pan, Bob Marley’s smile, Stevie Wonder’s drumming, Jack White’s mustache and a stage dive she once took at a music festival. Given that introduction, her debut album,
“The ArchAndroid,” has a lot to live up to -- and it does.
Monae, a 24-year-old Kansas City-born singer who now lives in Atlanta, announced her ambitions in 2008 by releasing an EP,
“Metropolis,” the first of an intended four-part science-fiction concept album. She was instead signed by Sean “Diddy” Combs to his Bad Boy label, and “Metropolis” eventually morphed into “The ArchAndroid,” in which she assumes an alter-ego personality as Cindi Mayweather, a messiah-like figure from the distant future who returns to the present to save a community of androids. Got it?
Loaded with vivid imagery and sound effects that resonate like movie scenes, “The ArchAndroid” is Monae’s bid to make an “emotion picture” about her futuristic world. The story line is complicated enough that only diehards will want to parse its every nuance, but it provides a framework for music that points both forward and back, embracing classical overtures, tribal funk, big-band swing, glam-rock and hip-hop. In some ways, it sounds an awful lot like an album her fellow Atlantans OutKast might’ve made. Indeed, she first found a measure of recognition with her vocals on OutKast’s 2006 album,
“Idlewild,” and Antwan “Big Boi” Patton of the hip-hop duo is listed as co-executive producer of “The ArchAndroid” and contributes a vocal to the percussive single “Tightrope.”